Though Harvard is 50% of the title, this is not a college comedy. In fact, we never even see a classroom or campus. Rather, John (Jason Lee) has to find a way to make good on a decade-old promise to put his niece through college. Long since having completely spaced that promise, John (Jason Lee) is looking forward to spending his nest-egg on a home for he and fiancee (Mann) when his niece reminds him that she's in need of thirty grand (coincidentally, the sum total of his nest-egg). The only depth the film displays lays in John's dilemma. Should he jilt his wife with the news and honor his word and family, or should he chalk it up to a mistake and move on with his life? Though, I enjoyed his internal struggle (and the sweetness of John who would have happily done both, had he sixty grand), the film's focus is clearly on his pairing with best bud Duff (Green) and their antics/shenanigans and otherwise illegal activities toward securing another 30k.

The film is framed with an edgy pro/epilogue in which motion speed toggles between slow and fast while Lee voices over with a pseudo-profundity. "Is everything fate?" It's actually quite smashing and believable as an introduction; but, since the silly, slapstick pranks comprise the majority of the content, the epilogue resounds somewhat emptily. That said, the bulk of this silly production is filmed with a bit of flair. Favoring solid primary and secondary colors in set design, implementing shifting craning movements and subtle image manipulation lenses (wide/fish eye) the result is an appropriate hint of cartoon.

As for the antics themselves, the early ones lack, sometimes loudly lacking. But like John's dumb-determination, the script keeps rubbing its two sticks together until something funny sparks. Lee and Green stumble into some laughs. Lee, the solid straight man coupled with the always risky Green hamming up and sometimes down (surprisingly, never gross or obscenely). But it's the secondaries that barely pull this film out of mediocrity. Mann is rock solid ("I'm sorry he's dead, but things aren't that great around here either."), Farina amusing, but it's Richard Jenkins that really sets the screen on fire with his sparklingly ability to make us believe the ridiculous. I also enjoyed the scripting and performance of the liquor store sequence and the clerk (Martin Starr) character, lines and performance, "Yeah it was them all the way, they stole the lottery money, and and the porno magazines, and the chocolate milk."

While robbing the store with plastic guns, the two buffoons warn, "Count to, uh, 300 ... no skipping numbers and no counting in base 8!"